However, the web standards themselves are unnecessarily complex. W3C and WHATWG are partly to blame. Remember HTML was supposed to be a document that the user could change the styling of similar to how some gopher clients would let user change the look of how you viewed all content.
However, that is kinda ancient history these days. However, the web standards need to make a new format that breaks backwards compatibility. An app based format, and a document only format. Sadly, I don't see this happening.
--EDIT-- Also a lot of web designed don't care if their site does not work if JS disabled...
If I were to rework the standards. I would make any syntax for standard defined languages quite strict. Further, for document based content make sure content is always readable with out freaking stupid dynamic eye candy.